


new constellations

by thealmostviki



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, but minimal i promise, the slightest bit of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-18 01:45:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13671684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealmostviki/pseuds/thealmostviki
Summary: In his first life, Kyoutani had wings. They weren't as beautiful as Yahaba's, nor as graceful, but that wasn't their purpose, after all.Or: Three things that make Kyoutani miss home and one thing that makes it all worth it





	new constellations

**Author's Note:**

> hey hey! this was my fill for the 2018 Valentine's exchange! I don't have anything much to say about this one- I've never written kyouhaba or an angel/reincarnation AU, but here's hoping it turns out alright. Stanny, I hope you like it!

  1.  books



 

   When they were fledglings they stole away from lessons one day and stumbled upon a bell tower. Before they were fitted in armor and swords of fire they were children still, only decades old, and sneaking around the castle complex was one of the few ways to escape from the prying eyes of adults. Deep down in the winding hallways the only things to hear were the echo of bare feet on stones, the fluttering of feathers around sharp corners. It was a different kind of magic than the kind they lived with and used, a magic somehow older than existence- not holy, but not worldly either. It was the kind that had permanence and weight and stayed with your soul when you left it behind. 

 

   Watari was the one who found the room. It was an old door, oak set deep in the stone walls, the doorknob dulled with age and abandonment. 

 

   “I’ve never noticed this door,” Watari said, eyeing it curiously. Yahaba tried the knob but the lock wouldn’t turn. 

 

   “Locked,” he announced as if Kentarou didn’t have eyes. 

 

   “It’s probably rusted,” Watari pointed out.

 

   Yahaba shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We can’t open it.”

 

  Kentarou examined the knob, jiggled it in his hand. 

 

   “Do you wanna get inside?” he asked. 

 

   “Obviously,” Yahaba snapped. Kentarou took that as all the permission he needed and pushed hard with the hell of his hand. The lock snapped, small bits of metal flying out, and the door swung inward. Yahaba’s scapulars stood on end; they always did when Kentarou did something he wasn’t supposed to do. 

 

   “You didn’t have to break the door,” he grumbled, peering into the darkened room.

 

   Kentarou huffed and stepped over the threshold. Just because Yahaba was too high and mighty to cut corners didn’t mean Kentarou was.

 

    The room was dark and smelled of mildew. The walls hadn’t been scrubbed in centuries, and the floor was cold and grainy on Kentarou’s bare feet. Something shone in the dim light of the hallways, bounding light from the hallways off the walls. Watari stepped forward, bringing his torch further into the doorframe and in the center of the room, illuminated, hung an old cracked bell. The supports were weak and dull, and the openings where the sound would have come out were sealed in stone. There were ropes in tatters around them, the worn cabling barely sufficient to hold the weight of the brass.

 

   “A bell tower?” Watari questioned. “I didn’t know this was here.”

 

   “They boarded it up. Of course you wouldn’t know it was here,” Kentarou grumbled, stepping further into the room. The air was cold and stagnant, heavy from the oxygen that hadn’t circulated in centuries.

 

   “They probably didn’t want to bother with the bell,” Yahaba pointed out, gesturing towards the crack. He took the torch from Watari and stepped toward the center of the room. In the middle, where the bell hung, the air vibrated with something chaotic.

 

   “Cursed room,” Yahaba commented. 

 

   Kentarou scoffed. “If it was cursed they would’ve gotten rid of it. It’s just old.”

 

   Watari’s eyes scanned the perimeter of the space. “We could fix it up, if we wanted. We could bring our books and old linens and remove some stones from the ceiling. No one knows about it but us.”

 

   “No,” Kentarou said at the same time Yahaba said “That’s a great idea!” They turned to look at each other, and Yahaba’s eyes were filled with challenge, blazing with that fire that only came with telling Kentarou ’no’.

 

   “I think it’s a good idea,” Yahaba challenged. “So you’re outvoted.”

 

   “This isn’t a democracy.”

 

   “What are you going to do? Tell Teacher?” Yahaba taunted, sounding particularly juvenile. “If we weren’t allowed up here they would’ve sealed it off. Are you going to help us or not?”

 

   Kentarou ground his teeth, wings tensing high above his head. They spent a lot of time in the castle libraries because Watari liked libraries and Yahaba liked Watari. There was about a ten percent chance that Yahaba genuinely liked the room, a forty percent chance he was going it for Watari, and a fifty percent chance he was doing it to screw with Kentarou’s day, but, as he’d said, Kentarou was outvoted either way. 

 

   And Kentarou? He hung around libraries because he liked books. At least, that’s what he’d been telling himself for the past twenty-eight years.

 

   “Alright,” Kentarou said. “But don’t tell anyone.”

 

   “Who would I tell?” Yahaba asked, blinking innocently. “I only trust the two of you.”

 

   Kentarou left before he could say something stupid and regretful.

 

   They were fledglings still, so it wasn’t hard to come up with several uninterrupted periods of the day where they could meet up to clean out the room. Kentarou pushed blocks on the edges of the ceiling out- places where gaps would be hard to spot- while Yahaba and Watari made sure he wasn’t causing structural damage. They borrowed old linens and pillows from seamstresses and formed piles on the floor. It was hard when the bell obscured vision across the center, but the centerpiece made the room complete somehow. Kentarou chose the east corner and brought up books from his home to form piles around his makeshift cushions.  Carrying a stack of books up several flights of stairs wasn’t easy, and it occurred to Kentarou that he didn’t even read most of the books he brought up, yet the more papers and volumes Yahaba, Watari and he brought up, swathed in old down and feather dust, the more at ease he was. Watari hung tapestries on the wall and tacked cotton to the floor to shield against the hard stone. One rainy day they all grabbed lacquer and some brushes from the armory and buffed the brass bell until it shone like it was new. The room was cleaned out, washed, swept. Sure, the spiders got to stay on insistence from Watari, but soon it was their chamber, their bell tower. Kentarou, in a moment of weakness and sentimentality, bought a lock and a set of three keys and brought it to their next meeting. Yahaba’s wings fluttered with excitement.

 

   “And here I thought you didn’t even want to be here,” he teased, accepting the key graciously. 

 

   Kentarou thought his feathers were standing on end. He swallowed and said “It’s just for privacy…yeah.”

 

   Yahaba smiled, all too knowing, and now Kentarou’s cheeks were burning too, so he hung his key on a chain around his neck and said he was going to practice. 

 

   In his bedroom on earth, he keeps a long bookshelf full of volumes he’s never read. Some are in languages he doesn’t know. There are stacks of books on his desk and piles beside his bed, under his bed, on the floor of his closet. He’s not dumb. He isn’t even lazy. He would read all those books, if he had the time, if he wasn’t at volleyball practice for five hours a day and struggling through his classes for the rest of his waking hours. But he needs them around him, needs to smell the paper and see the wind brush the pages and the sun illuminate the roughness on the older yellowed parchment that looks like it will crumble at the slightest touch. Some of these books are too new, too clean. They feel artificial. There is no life in them. His bedroom is not his bell tower.

 

   Sometimes Yahaba will drop by and bring feathers he’s collected in random places, just so Kentarou can feel like he’s molting. He means well, Kentarou knows he does, but it always makes his shoulder blades burn, and then all of him is burning, so he goes out and hits more spikes and then he goes to a bookstore and adds more books to his pile and tells himself he doesn’t miss anything at all.

 

  1. milk and honey



 

When they’re young, before their adult plumage grows in, they drank milk and honey. Of course, it wasn’t milk and honey-it was some substance that didn’t translate, a word Kentarou’s human tongue couldn’t make, that fizzled into static in his language processor and threatened to tear a hole in his vocal chords. They’re too far from divinity to produce the sounds, so when they talk about it now they say it was milk and honey. Yahaba always made it the best, although Kentarou would’ve rather died than admit it, but that was okay because Yahaba knew. Yahaba was smarter than he looked even back then, but Kentarou would never admit that either.

 

   They started drills when they entered their seventies, which was young but not enough that Kentarou feels robbed of childhood. Drills meant that lessons get cut short and meals scattered away from their appropriate times. Kentarou is training to be a soldier, which means his work is long and tough and painful. Sometimes he barely has the energy to climb up the stairs to their hideaway, too much pain in his legs from the running and dropping, an ache on his spine from having his wings bound tight enough to leave imprints, the echoes of his superiors’ reprimands drowning out his own heartbeat. If it’s dark enough he’ll squeeze himself through an empty window and drop to the floor. Yahaba always frowns at him when he does that, claiming that someone could see. The secrecy is needless-undoubtedly their caretakers know where they are-but something about keeping the matter hush makes it more important and now that they’re older they’re staring to realize how unimportant they truly are. Right now it’s drills, but soon drills will become mock battles, will become custom armor and weapons and battalions that stretch lightyears in the distance. For Yahaba, a novice diplomat, soon it will be long robes and small smiles, walking into hellholes with blank eyes and a white smile, and Kentarou will no longer be permitted to look him in the face, would likely not recognize him regardless. That’s still decades away, but when he was twenty-eight and young enough to walk around barefoot and break the locks off abandoned rooms he also thought he had decades left to waste. Time moves fast for a place so endless.

 

   It’s one of the long nights when Kentarou drops in, hair wet from the cloud cover and his whole body shaking with cold. Yahaba opens his mouth to complain but makes a sound of alarm when he sees the state Kentarou is in.

 

   “Why would you fly here in the rain?” he scolded, draping a blanket over Kentarou’s shoulders. “This is a stone building. you’ll freeze.”

 

   “It’s fine,” Kentarou said roughly, trying to push Yahaba off. Yahaba’s scapulars tensed. 

 

   “It’s not fine. I waited all this time for you only to find you half frozen. You’re soaked. Why didn’t you go home?”

 

   Kentarou bit his tongue and didn’t say anything. He wasn’t about to say he flew half an hour in the cold and mist because he wanted to see Yahaba, because it was one of the few things that got him through the daily beating at the ends of the archangels. He couldn’t say it. Kentarou still had that much pride left in him.

 

   At his silence, Yahaba made a frustrated noise and stepped towards the door. 

 

   “Don’t go anywhere,” he commanded as if there were anywhere to go. “I’ll be back.”

 

   Then he left, the echo of his voice still bouncing around the stone circle. The room was empty without Yahaba in it. He had too much presence; he took all the energy with him when he left.

 

   Kentarou must’ve been more tired than he thought, because he zoned out or fell asleep or somehow lost enough time that the next thing he knew Yahaba was pushing a warm cup into his hand and piling blankets in his lap.

 

   “It’s almost snowing outside,” Yahaba said, voice still harsh and annoyed. “If we’re staying here, we have to keep warm and since we neglected to build a fire pit, we’ll have to use these blankets.”

 

   “You could light one under the bell,” Kentarou mumbled, letting Yahaba manhandle him away from the exterior walls.

 

   “The metal would expand unevenly. Then the bell won’t work.”

 

   “It’s already cracked.”

 

   Yahaba tsked and said nothing else. He sat behind Kentarou with a long towel in his hands and started rubbing the ice out of Kentarou’s hair. It was also possible he was warming his hands with his own energy because the frozen hairs melted in his grip, wetting the cloth so that every so often he would drop it and pick up a new section. They didn’t say anything, but that was fine for them. Neither of them had much energy left, and Yahaba was busy heating his hands; he hadn’t gotten the hang of offhand focus yet.

 

   “Please take care of yourself,” Yahaba said finally. “I don’t know how many years we have left where we can be like this.”

 

   “Don’t worry about me.” Kentarou sipped his drink, letting his slide down his throat and warm his insides. “You’re the fragile one who does the paperwork.”

 

   Yahaba yanked on his hair. Hard. Kentarou yelped. 

 

   “Watch yourself. You’re talking to a diplomat-in-training.”

 

   “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re the fragile one, Sir.”

 

   “Better.”

 

   Kentarou’s hands were warm through the ceramic. They had a few more decades.

 

   Now Kentarou presses a dark blue mug into Yahaba’s hands as they sit huddled under a blanket in Yahaba’s living room, watching some old show on TV. Yahaba takes a sip and reels back.

 

   “It’s too sweet,” he declares, making a pinched face.

 

   “I did the same thing I always do.”

 

   “Well, it’s too sweet.”

 

   “Do you want me to make it again?” Kentarou growls, and Yahaba puts up a hand in surrender. 

 

   “No, don’t bother. it’s fine.”

 

   “Now you’re just saying that,” Kentarou grumbles, getting to his feet and holding out his hand. “Give me the cup.” Yahaba relents and hands over the mug. 

 

   “Less honey?” Kentarou confirms.

 

   “If you please?” Yahaba opens his eyes wide, so dark and shiny Kentarou can see the TV clearly reflected in them. If he had wings they would’ve been curled oh so slightly, enough to indicate distress, but Kentarou is getting used to how Yahaba’s emotions look without them.

 

   “It’ll never taste exactly right,” Kentarou reminds him. Yahaba waves him away.    

 

   “Didn’t ask,” he says, and leaves it at that. Kentarou sighs and dumps the drink into the sink, pours more milk into the pot on the stove. It hadn’t been milk and honey, not back then, but they are human now, with human mouths and stomachs and throats and tongues, and milk and honey would have to outlast their memories. 

 

  1. blood



 

   Years pass, decades, scores. The bricks on the inside begin to wear away again. Their young feathers fall out and mature ones grow, tipped in gold and silver. Kentarou steps into his classroom and the women fromm the citadel grab his hands and drag him into the building, fitting him for armor. The hilt of his sword is the same color as Yahaba’s eyes.

 

   Watari is in training for medical aid, growing his magic far beyond either Yahaba or Kentarou. When he’s home, the air is charged with magical energy, not that they see him often. The medical class tends to be distant from the others, both out of business and propriety. Finding yourself too attached to the mangled body that finds its way to your table could prove detrimental to work. He still stops by from time to time but Kentarou pretends that he doesn’t notice the way his area grows emptier each day, a thin layer of dust across his gradually disappearing books.

 

   “I’m sorry,” he says one day, and the sunlight is bright in the windows but Kentarou is as cold as if it were midnight in midwinter. “My superiors insist.”

 

Yahaba bites his lip. “It’s not your fault,” he says finally. “Soon we’ll be gone too.”

 

Watari bites his lip nervously. “This doesn’t change anything. I’m still with you. Always.” He wants to mean it, they all know he does, but they also all know that promises made these days are easily broken.

 

   Kentarou shoulders past both of them and storms out of the tower, out of the castle library itself, hoping to find somewhere, anywhere to avoid the scene back in their tower that grows darker by the day, the shining brass bell that has dulled over their decades of absence, and time that seemed to drag on is now happening too fast too fast too fast. Kentarou has been alive for centuries and yet it is not enough time. 

 

   “I wish there was no war,” Yahaba says later, as they sit with their books laid out in front of them, assignments due too soon, past due, too much work and not enough hours in the endless days. Watari is at training, always at training. They haven’t seen him since he vacated the tower. They barely see each other, sometimes, with their late nights and early morning obligations. Kentarou is two hundred years old and he is hanging on by threads.

 

   “I hate fighting.”

 

   “Doesn’t stop you from fighting with me since the day you were born,” Kentarou reminds him.

 

   “And you deserve every second of it,” Yahaba snaps. he stops, pauses, takes a breath. “Promise me,” he starts.

 

   “What?”

 

   “That if something happens you won’t do something stupid like come after me.”

 

   Kentarou scowled. “That implies you’re going to do something stupid first, and you’re too much of a stick in the mud to try anything.”

 

   “Shut up,” Yahaba says, but his voice isn’t as light as it normally is. “Some of the things in the archives I’ve seen, some of the scrolls Watari brings back…” Yahaba trails off, biting his lip. His wings are stretched and tense at his sides, the small feathers at the base of his neck stiffening with repressed panic. “Just promise me.”

 

   Kentarou watches him, sees his hands curled into fists and his scapulars on the bring of raising, the reassurance he needs a hair’s breadth away. It’s been two hundred years and Kentarou still can’t tell what Yahaba is thinking, still can’t determine his fears or his needs or the source of the fire behind his eyes. 

 

   But he does know he’ll promise Yahaba anything he asks.

 

   “I wouldn’t come after you,” he scoffs, trying to sound nonchalant. “Watari’s the one who cleans up your mistakes, not me.”

 

   “I’m making sure,” Yahaba says, tension falling away from his shoulders like a string has been cut. “You do stupid things sometimes.”

 

   “I assure you, it won’t be an issue.”

 

   He doesn’t know why he’s lying. He only knows that for all Yahaba’s smarts, all his knowledge and analytics and piercing eyes that see more than anyone else, he’s stupid if he can’t see that saving Yahaba has never been and will never be a mistake.

 

   It all becomes irrelevant because the next day their battalions are called and Kentarou leaves the citadel and the forest and the castle library behind and goes to fight a war. Yahaba becomes a diplomat. He sneaks into the Grand Palace and steals the scrolls marked with heathen symbols.

 

   They win. Kentarou doesn’t see it.

 

   By then he is already burning and crashing and breaking, his wings are ripped out from his shoulder blades as he plummets to the ground, bracing for impact. By then they are human and the stupid thing has already been done. And it’s over. Their linens lie in their bell tower, collecting dust in a cursed room with no key for entry.

 

 

   Kentarou’s hands bleed after long practices. He doesn’t take care of his hands in the slightest and feels no guilt about it. He’ll slam down balls as hard as he can and imagine throwing javelins, hitting targets, landing on the ground with enough force to make cracks along the earth, a crater on the gym floor in the imprints of his feet. If he jumps high enough, he can be still for a moment at the apex, a split second of suspension when it feels like he is weightless, levitating of his own volition. If Yahaba asks, he doens’t miss his wings, or the pain that accompanies them. He never thought he’d miss his drills, his superiors, his aching muscles and bent allulas, but he does. Yahaba tells him he needs to learn to move on sometime. 

 

   Then again, Yahaba’s a liar too. He’s captain of the team, after all.

 

   Yahaba bandages his hands. Kentarou is sure Yahaba thinks he gets them from fist fights or destructive moods or whatever else Kentarou does in his spare time on this earthly plane, but he doesn’t care. Watari talks all the time about coping and repression and trauma, but Kentarou doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be repressing. He was an angel and now he’s not. He had wings and now he doesn’t. He had a solar system inside his palms and now there is only red blood on Yahaba’s bathroom floor. It’s not difficult at all. He wonders if when Watari disobeyed his superior to find the strange vials in an unmarked room in the Grand Palace if the electric shock of the security fried his brain cells.

 

   Yahaba finishes bandaging his hand and kisses his fingers for luck. 

 

   “Please be more careful. I spend half my income on gauze wraps, and you can’t play with fucked up hands.”

 

   “I am careful,” Kentarou says. 

 

   Yahaba shakes his head and leans across the divide to hug Kentarou. Kentarou lets him, hugs him back and smells Yahaba’s shampoo, feels the heat of his skin, his own blood pulsing in his veins, each heartbeat a drum under the surface.

 

   “Don’t do anything stupid,” Yahaba says. 

 

   “I already did the stupid thing.”

 

   “So did Watari,” Yahaba admitted. 

 

   “So did you.”

 

   “I never said I was the smart one.”

 

   “Yeah, you only act and talk like it across two lifetimes. No big deal.”

 

   Kentarou shrugged. They’re both dumb, and now they’re human, and that’s just the way it is.

  

 

 

    +1. yahaba

 

   This time, they are sitting in Yahaba’s bedroom, listening to music from a band that turned cringey three years ago. They’re sitting how they always do with Yahaba sprawled on top of him like a lazy child and Kentarou picking at his phone. He’s been lying on his back for a few hours  and his shoulder blades are beginning to burn with phantom pain, limbs he no longer owns turning to static as they fall asleep. Kentarou pushes Yahaba’s shoulder lightly.

 

   “Hey, get up,” he says. “My back hurts.”

 

   Yahaba sits up with little prompting. “Are you okay?”

 

   “Yeah, it’s just…you know.”

 

   Yahaba hums and says nothing more. They don’t talk about it much. Some days their wings ache. Their bodies are small compared to what they used to be. Kentarou isn’t used to having his feet touch the ground. Yahaba has not picked up a lute since he entered this life, took his brother’s flute and slammed it against the wall in anger. Watari avoids the occult section like the plague, saw an alchemical symbol on the cover of a book and almost passed out in the the middle of the aisle. They don’t talk about it much, though. Those were old lives. Old constellations. They’re here now. Human. The same.

 

   Kentarou rolls his shoulders, flexing the muscles. He brings his hand behind his back and tells himself the raised scars are only in his head, that you wouldn’t see if them if you didn’t think they were there and that means they don’t matter. 

 

   “Do you miss it?” Yahaba asks.

 

   “Miss what?”

 

   “All of it.”

 

   “I don’t miss all of it. Some of it sucked. Some of this sucks too.”

 

   Kentarou flops onto his back, staring blankly up at the ceiling. They aren’t holy anymore; there’s no divinity in their blood or iron in their bones. Yahaba has no magic, no Grace, and no reason to capture Kentarou’s attention. But the truth it is was never the magic. It wasn’t the holiness or the puffed up scapulars or the warmth in his hand on cold nights. It’s always been Yahaba and his wide brown eyes and slick smile and long fingers, soft even in this life, so familiar under his own. It's always been long nights in a cold bell tower and books piles high around Yahaba's silver armor and when Yahaba grabbed his hand and said that something wasn't right, that they'd been lied to and that everyone deserved to know Kentarou had stood by him, had fallen with him, had let his wings be ripped from his body not for honor and valor and morality but because he loved Yahaba more than his duty and that was his greatest transgression. He would've ripped his wings out himself for Yahaba, even though he looks and feels less without them, too light without a weight on their shoulders, but it's still their skin, still their hands and faces and hearts. Their bodies are foreign but familiar. It’s all they have left of home. Yahaba is all he has left of home.

 

   “Some of it doesn’t, though,” Kentarou admitted. 

 

   Yahaba looks up and meets his eyes. “Yeah?”

 

   “I guess,” Kentarou said, and Yahaba smiles, human and tired and weak but so dazzling it takes Kentarou’s breath away. 

 

   “I guess so, too,” Yahaba says, using Kentarou’s shoulder as a handhold to get to his feet.

 

   “Milk and honey?” Kentarou guesses.

 

   “You never make it right. I have to do everything myself.”

 

   “It’ll never taste exactly right, you know,” Kentarou reminds him.

 

   Yahaba waves him off as he exits the room. “Didn’t ask.”

 

   Kentarou picks a book off one of Yahaba’s piles. The title is in English but that’s fine. He doesn’t want to read it. He flips through the pages, old ones, yellowed and cracked, a sticker on the cover for a thrift store that went out of business four years ago. He lies back down in the sun, lets the light filter through the thin paper. His back doesn’t hurt.

 

   Yahaba is worth it.


End file.
